I wanted to see what how people were speaking about Steve Jobs and especially what terms were being used to describe him. There was no point in performing sentiment analysis on this text as all of the texts were not only obviously positive but were also vetted by Apple for content. Using NLTK, I performed part-of-speech tagging on every word in each tribute message and then wrote some code to total the adjectives and adverbs used in the tribute messages.

The top descriptors? Not surprisingly: great, many, first, sad, better, best, and visionary. About one in five messages referenced an Apple product.